Minnesota News

As Kuoth Wiel wore her Augsburg College robe, she looked antsy like many grads. Her graduation day emotions may seem typical, but what's going on in her life right now, and what happened in her past, are far from it.

The new tobacco tax signed into law last week will raise the price of cigarettes in Minnesota by $1.60 a pack, add more than $430 million to state coffers over the next two years and, public health advocates hope, prevent nearly 48,000 young people from taking up the habit.

Only time will tell whether Farmington and Rosemount's tradeoffs will improve achievement.

In the final hour of the session, printed copies of the Legislative Wrap-up were delivered to the House.

The forecast this summer calls for extra checks in lakes big and small to stop the spread of invasive species, much to some boaters' dismay.

Richard Carlbom, center, campaign manager for Minnesotans United was the main organizer for the effort to pass the marriage bill.

The 2013 Legislature was an all-DFL show. But to hear legislators from the two parties tell it, the session was a "win-win." I consider that fact a marker of how wide the gulf between Minnesota's parties remains, even though the voters consigned one of those parties to minority status in 2012.

At the State Capitol Governor Mark Dayton signed the gay marriage bill into law in front of several thousand supporters earlier this month.

Now that this year's legislative session - otherwise known as "DFLers gone wild" - is mercifully over, Minnesota's monopoly party can get to work planning its next assault on American tradition.

With the Basilica of St. Mary in the background a sold-out "Rock the Garden" concert at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis featured Solid Gold, The Decembrists, Calexico and Yeasayer Saturday June 20, 2009.

A little more than a couple of months ago, artist Bryan Holland was being filmed by a crew from Twin Cities Public Television.

Minnesota's per-ton tax on taconite iron ore produced in the state will increase a dime this year, and the extra money will be dedicated to help rebuild and retool Iron Range schools.

Pre-Commissioning Unit Minnesota , the nation's newest and most advanced nuclear-powered attack submarine, moored May 16 at Huntington Ingalls Industry's Newport News Shipbuilding following its successful completion of Alpha and Bravo sea trials.

With public attention focused on debates in the Capitol rotunda, a more select crowd filled a small conference room last week to fight over transportation legislation aimed at northern Minnesota.

"We just see the people swarming in," said employee Nancy Horsch. "People are definitely itching to get out and get their fingers dirty." "It really is their biggest one.

For all the heated rhetoric about the Affordable Care Act being a rigid, top-down approach to health care, the 2010 federal health reform law in reality gives states abundant opportunities to innovate, and often the additional funding needed to make it happen.

Finally at Five...some native Minnesotans have a new home in Indiana. Wolf Park is located near the town of Battle Ground and the latest addition to the family are three gray fox pups from a facility in Minnesota.

Two Minnesotans are among four men charged with creating false identification information and bogus tax-preparation businesses, then conspiring with others to file more than 1,000 federal returns that gushed out nearly $7 million in refunds.

One of the nation's worst corporate welfare and redistribution of wealth schemes will live on - the U.S. Congress has re-upped our deal with the sugar industry making sure that taxpayers will get fleeced, environmental degradation will continue, genetically modified crops will rule and jobs will be lost around the country.

Our STD rate might be on the rise , but at least Minnesota's teens are having safer sex: Between 2007 and 2011, the number of teens giving birth in the state dropped by more than 30 percent.